Friday, October 18, 2002

IBM is gearing up to take WebSphere V5 live, as the company offered a sneak peek this week of some of the upgrades over previous versions. Chief among these, according to IBM Director of Marketing for WebSphere Scott Hebner, is the addition of an integrated workflow engine geared to tie Web services together. The Armonk, N.Y. firm claims it is the first full Web services workflow tool for the Java Enterprise Edition. Gartner analyst Jess Thompson told internetnews.com the news is an indication of how IBM is assimilating the assets of such workflow integration and business process management purchases as CrossWorlds, MetaMerge and Holosofx. This, Thompson said, is important because those firms contain certain assets that overlap with features of IBM's Websphere MQSeries integration software. Thompson said he estimates the streamling of those assets may take three to four years.

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Microsoft's web-services strategy, until now focused on the tactical issue of IT plumbing, is shifting to the more strategic, and tougher, set of problems involving business processes. Products in development, described for the first time last week, aim not only to connect employees and companywide operations but also to improve collaboration and maybe even reinvent processes. It's a big step for a company with a 25-year reputation as a platform provider. The new spin became clearer last week, as Microsoft executives appeared at events on both coasts to describe how new XML-based products will address collaboration, business-process management, and real-time visibility of data.

Saturday, October 05, 2002

Lombardi Software has announced version 3.3 of TeamWorks, the company's business process management (BPM) platform that connects people, processes and systems. "Our customers are deploying TeamWorks to tie their business processes with their business objectives, which include improved revenue and operational efficiency," said Rod Favaron, president and CEO of Lombardi Software. "By managing, monitoring and optimizing their processes, they're removing process latency, reducing costs, resolving supplier and customer issues and plugging revenue leaks." Business processes typically span multiple organizations and systems, creating process gaps that employees bridge with time-consuming, manual steps. To solve this problem, TeamWorks branches across various systems, gathering and delivering information from the right application at the right time so people spend their time on the process, not searching for data. Since most business processes require some level of human involvement to resolve process exceptions and respond to business events, TeamWorks can be used for processes throughout an enterprise.

FileNET, a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, has introduced the Process Analyzer, a new reporting and analytics tool designed to help enterprises optimize their business operations and increase the returns they realize from their BPM investment. Using a graphical interface, the Process Analyzer provides visibility into business processes with comprehensive tracking metrics and reports. For customer service intense organizations, the Process Analyzer can help manage performance by analyzing key elements of business operations, such as the types of inquiries processed, processing cycle times, customer response times and productivity per employee. "An organization's processes and its ability to execute on those processes truly define its business performance," said Michael W. Harris, senior vice president, products and strategy for FileNET. "By enabling real-time reporting in an easy-to-use package, the Process Analyzer is the first solution to take BPM out of the back office and make it accessible for executives and line-of-business managers. The Process Analyzer is a powerful tool that enables enterprises to measure and prove the value of their business operations, respond more quickly to market demands and opportunities, develop best practices and continuously improve their operations."

Friday, October 04, 2002

In late June 2002, Sun Microsystems and three partners introduced a proposed choreography standard aimed at filling in the gaps between existing orchestration technologies. Developed by Intalio, BEA Systems, SAP, and Sun, the Web Services Choreography Interface specification (WSCI)—pronounced "whiskey"—is an XML specification for the flow of messages between interacting Web services. WSCI is the first time you can look at orchestration in a useful way because it brings in the notion of anticipated behavior," Friedman of META Group says. Step-by-step, subprocess technologies like orchestration languages are absolutely necessary to automate business flows, but simply specifying the order of steps in a process is not enough.

Tuesday, October 01, 2002

IDS Scheer the leading provider of business process excellence services and tools, today announced that IDS Scheer Inc., Philadelphia, USA, has extended its relationship with Intalio, a most important developer of business process management software. Through the agreement, IDS Scheer and Intalio will develop a joint solution to integrate the Intalio|n3 Business Process Management System into ARIS to offer a complete solution to design, implement, execute, and manage intra- and inter-enterprise processes using IDS Scheer's award-winning ARIS Tools. The announcement takes the IDS Scheer/Intalio partnership to the next step, reflecting a stronger technical integration between the companies' flagship products. IDS Scheer will leverage the Intalio technology to deliver a single solution, enabling its huge customer base to use ARIS, the market-leading software for business process modeling, to manage the entire business process lifecycle from the design and deployment of business processes, to their operative execution and optimization. The companies is also joining forces to provide marketing, sales, and support for the product worldwide. "We are looking forward to continuously growing our relationship with IDS Scheer, and leveraging the synergies between our products and expertise," commented Tom Meyer, CEO of Intalio. "By integrating the Intalio technology with the ARIS solution, we can bring our vision to IDS Scheer's global customer base, and help organizations around the world achieve efficiencies and reduce costs with 'straight-through' process deployment." The solution will enable customers to use ARIS to create executable business processes, including all the required system bindings and messaging for the collaboration of multiple process parties. These processes can be deployed across a wide range of enterprise applications and platforms to enable process-driven automation and collaboration throughout the lifecycle.

The new business process modelling language (BPML) 1.0 specification will be given a kick-start with its first implementation in a new release of System Architect enterprise modelling tool from Popkin Software. BPML provides a formal approach to modelling end-to-end business processes. It also supports XML-based process definitions to help communication between multiple vendors' systems and modelling tools used for web services. It is developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) organisation, a large consortium of vendors and users that includes IBM, Hewlett Packard (HP), BEA, Sun and SAP, and modelling tools companies Rational, Casewise and Popkin. [BPML] is critical to web services because it defines how partners collaborate together," said Martin Owen, Popkin Software EMEA consulting service manager. "How do you know whether the system is going to operate if you don't consider the end-to-end architecture?"